We Still Don't Hear Him
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed: April 2, 2010
The great man was moving with what seemed like great reluctance. He knew as
he climbed from the car in Upper Manhattan that he was stepping into the
maelstrom, that there were powerful people who would not react kindly to
what he had to say.
"I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight," said the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., "because my conscience leaves me no other choice."
This was on the evening of April 4, 1967, almost exactly 43 years ago. Dr.
King told the more than 3,000 people who had crowded into Riverside Church
that silence in the face of the horror that was taking place in Vietnam
amounted to a "betrayal."
He spoke of both the carnage in the war zone and the toll the war was taking
here in the United States. The speech comes to mind now for two reasons: A
Tavis Smiley documentary currently airing on PBS revisits the controversy
set off by Dr. King's indictment of "the madness of Vietnam." And recent
news reports show ever-increasing evidence that we have ensnared ourselves
in a mad and tragic venture in Afghanistan.
Dr. King spoke of how, in Vietnam, the United States increased its
commitment of troops "in support of governments which were singularly
corrupt, inept, and without popular support."
It's strange, indeed, to read those words more than four decades later as we
are increasing our commitment of troops in Afghanistan to fight in support
of Hamid Karzai, who remains in power after an election that the world knows
was riddled with fraud and whose government is one of the most corrupt and
inept on the planet.
If Mr. Karzai is at all grateful for this support, he has a very peculiar
way of showing it. He has ignored pleas from President Obama and others to
take meaningful steps to rein in the rampant corruption. His brother, Ahmed
Wali Karzai, the kingpin in southern Afghanistan, is believed by top
American officials to be engaged in all manner of nefarious activities,
including money-laundering and involvement in the flourishing opium trade.
Hamid Karzai himself pulled off a calculated insult to the U.S. by inviting
Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidential palace in Kabul, where
Ahmadinejad promptly delivered a fiery anti-American speech. As Dexter
Filkins and Mark Landler reported in The Times this week: "Even as Mr. Obama
pours tens of thousands of additional American troops into the country to
help defend Mr. Karzai's government, Mr. Karzai now often voices the view
that his interests and the United States' no longer coincide."
Is this what American service members are dying for in Afghanistan? Can you
imagine giving up your life, or your child's life, for that crowd?
In his speech, Dr. King spoke about the damage the Vietnam War was doing to
America's war on poverty, and the way it was undermining other important
domestic initiatives. What he wanted from the U.S. was not warfare overseas
but a renewed commitment to economic and social justice at home. As he put
it: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military
defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
The speech set loose a hurricane of criticism. Even the N.A.A.C.P.
complained that Dr. King should stick to what it perceived as his area of
expertise, civil rights. The New York Times headlined its editorial on the
speech, "Dr. King's Error."
Mr. Smiley, in his documentary, noted that "the already strained
relationship between President Johnson and Dr. King became fractured beyond
repair." And donations to Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership
Conference "began to dry up."
So it took great courage for Dr. King to speak out as he did.
His bold stand seems all the more striking in today's atmosphere, in which
moral courage among the very prominent - the kind of courage that carries
real risk - seems mostly to have disappeared.
More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq and more than 1,000 in
Afghanistan, where the Obama administration has chosen to escalate rather
than to begin a careful withdrawal. Those two wars, as the Nobel laureate
Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have told us, will ultimately
cost us more than $3 trillion.
And yet the voices in search of peace, in search of an end to the "madness,"
in search of the nation-building so desperately needed here in the United
States, are feeble indeed.
Dr. King would be assassinated exactly one year (almost to the hour) after
his great speech at Riverside Church. It's the same terrible fate that
awaits some of the American forces, most of them very young, that we
continue to send into the quagmire in Afghanistan.
***
From: Matt Lockshin, CREDO Action <act@credoaction.com>
Date: Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 3:16 PM
Subject: Speak out for Net Neutrality THURSDAY DEADLINE
Today we sent an alert asking for public comments to the FCC in support of
net neutrality. Hours after we sent the e-mail, the D.C. Court of Appeals
issued a ruling that has made our cause more urgent. I wanted to briefly
explain what happened and why, more than ever, we still need you to submit
public comments to the FCC by Thursday's deadline if you haven't already
[click
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/fccnn_replycomments/?r=5419&id=8550-1170924-h1tVNTx.]
In 2002, the FCC, working in alliance with the Bush administration and its
corporate backers, went on a deregulation binge. The FCC decided to classify
and treat broadband Internet service providers outside of the legal
framework that traditionally applied to the companies that offer two-way
communications services.
Today, the court held that as long as that Bush-era reclassification stands,
the FCC lacks the authority to impose on broadband providers certain
important regulations, including net neutrality. Because both the D.C. Court
of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court are consistent allies of corporations
over citizens, it is unlikely that this will be overturned.
Despite the ruling, the FCC can still impose net neutrality rules. But first
the FCC must reclassify broadband companies as telecommunications carriers.
The FCC has the ability to do this, but it needs to see strong public
support to justify revisiting the Bush-era decision. It is now even more
urgent that we speak out in support of net neutrality before Thursday's
deadline if you haven't already done so:
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/fccnn_replycomments/?r=5419&id=8550-1170924-h1tVNTx
Matt Lockshin, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action
P.S. For more information, check out articles in the Los Angeles Times and
Washington Post and a Huffington Post blog from Free Press.
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